The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
The greatest American biography ever written. A 1,162-page account of Robert Moses, who never won an election but remade New York City through sheer accumulation of bureaucratic power. Caro's investigation of how power corrupts, and how urban planning can devastate communities, is as much a theory of American democracy as it is a portrait of one man.
Length and repetition is the near-universal complaint: “the repetition of his points was mind-numbing,” one reader asking “how many times should it be necessary to say this?” and concluding “this book did not need to be this long.” It is a prosecutorial book, built to convict, and a critic faults Caro for treating “Moses's history too personally, without explaining.” Spending twelve hundred pages in his company wears: “it can be a drag spending so much time with Moses.” The hardcover is heavy enough that “my back started feeling the strain of hauling this around.” And a live accuracy dispute surrounds the low-overpass claim, which later researchers found no documentary evidence for.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
